Life at the Death Valley Insect Ranch — or Worm Ranch, depending on which sub-Kinko’s sign you read — is pretty sweet for heterosexual live-in pals Jason and Ralph. Respectively played by Sole Survivor’s Al Valletta and Pets’ Mike Cartel (also this film’s writer/director/editor), the guys are enjoying a day of drinking beer, shooting guns and wearing denim when they see something unusual in the distance. Moseying over to investigate, they discover a freshly dug grave containing a beautiful blonde woman nude in a coffin, but still possessing a pulse. (If only she could lend that to the script.)

Because Ralph and Jason are stand-up guys, they aim to do the right thing; unfortunately, before they get the chance, they are kidnapped by a gang of women and held against their will at the ladies’ secluded compound. With names like Torchy, Pepper and Vampire, these tough gals would radiate the fight-’em-or-fuck-’em nature of the classic Russ Meyer vixen, if Cartel had given them personalities, not to mention distinguishing traits beyond the obvious “the fat one.” Forcing the assistance of Jason and Ralph, the abductors plot revenge for their buried-alive sister via stealing a suitcase of plutonium from their enemies’ carefully guarded warehouse.

Let me be clear: Despite that case and its radioactive contents, Runaway Nightmare is no Kiss Me Deadly. Whereas Robert Aldrich’s 1955 noir classic concerned private detective Mike Hammer, this indie centers around two guys as dumb as a box of hammers.

Apparently considering himself quite the wisecracker, Cartel wrote himself a stream of one-liners neither humorous nor appropriate for the situation or established tone. If viewers do laugh, it will be for inadvertent reasons — namely, painful silences and lines delivered so awkwardly, they barely resemble how we as humans speak. A perfect example of Nightmare‘s mix of debilitated pacing and stunted attempts at comic relief can be found in a brief exchange between Ralph and one of his captors:

Woman: “Hey, I’m trying to communicate! I’m into sunshine, awareness, good karma, vibes and witchcraft.”
Ralph: “Well … we do have a lot in common.”
Woman: “I’d like to mix our blood.”

All that bit lacks is Jo Anne Worley popping through a trapdoor just long enough to mug at the camera and say, “Sock it to me!”

Suspense? Only if you care how high the score will go on a pinball machine played midway through the picture. Cartel takes his setup — one of “Dear Penthouse Forum, I never thought it would happen to me …” — to nowhere particularly intriguing, yet the movie finishes as mildly likable for its substantial deficiencies. It’s like a shaggy dog you wouldn’t mind having around, if only it were trained to stop licking your skin and dirty-pawing at your just-pressed pants. —Rod Lott

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Like a lo-fi take on Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, Joseph Sims-Dennett’s Observance puts the troubled Parker (Lindsay Farris, Primal) behind the telephoto lens of a camera perched in an abandoned apartment wallpapered in Asian newspapers. For reasons unknown even to him, he’s been hired to spy on Tenneal (Stephanie King, TV’s The Code), whose home sits opposite.

Grief-stricken and anxious for distraction, Parker can’t help but poke at the scab and wonder what’s up, and a peek into her past sends him — and the story — down uncharted territory. Clearly, what’s going on across the street is not as important as what’s going on inside his own head. Without revealing too much, Sims-Dennett (Bad Behaviour) starts channeling David Lynch, and Lynch begets another David, as in Cronenberg. You’ll never look at tar the same again.

Well-acted and shot with a handheld grip, the purposely vague Australian thriller can be as confounding as it is intriguing, to those unaccustomed to its paranoid bent. To want a little less Conservation and a little more action from Observance is missing the film’s point and denying oneself the rewarding pleasures of its slow burn. —Rod Lott

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In the curious case of Corpse Mania, its iconic Shaw Brothers shield logo may as well stand for “Sex Bizarro.” Necrophilia tends to bear that rep.

Residents of a street in Guangzhou notice that ever since that mysterious man Li Zhengyuan (Erik Chan Ka Kei, Human Lanterns) moved in, the streets are heavy with a “fetid odor.” Perhaps it has to do with the only piece of luggage he brought … assuming, of course, that a woman’s dead body counts as luggage. Nosy neighbors take a peek, only to find that nude corpse in bed, rotting with decay and covered head-to-toe in maggots.

It seems that Li has a history with this sort of thing, having purchased Hongmei (Jenny Liang, Hex vs. Witchcraft), a deathly ill prostitute, from the popular whorehouse run by Madam Lan (Tanny Ni Tien, Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold) in the nearby village of Foshan. When Hongmei soon perished, a horny Li had his way with her. Ah, young love!

Clad in standard Invisible Man garb — hat, sunglasses, scarf wrapped around the face — Li is investigated by the police. The body horror of Corpse Mania gives way to a slasher subplot, then ultimately a murder mystery. Director Kuei Chih-Hung (The Killer Snakes) co-wrote the script, which concludes in an info-dump of exposition unloaded with the force of a post-Mexico excursion bout of diarrhea. Good for one watch, it doesn’t hold the repeat value of some of the Shaws’ other horror hybrids. —Rod Lott

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Just as Hellhole is not your average women-in-prison picture, the Ashland Sanitarium for Women is not your average nuthouse. It’s where Susan (Judy Landers, Stewardess School) is sent after her mother is murdered before her eyes and she suffers a head injury while escaping the killer’s nicotine-stained clutches. Susan awakens in the asylum with a classic case of amnesia, which is convenient for Landers, who always seems absent-minded in her roles. Bless her buxom heart, but she’s all puffy hair and vacant stare.

The reasons for her mom’s death? Purely unimportant, other than to keep Susan in peril even within the institution’s walls, because the killer (Ray Sharkey, Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills) disguises himself as an orderly in hopes of finding her alone so he can finish the job; if he happens to bangs a nurse and/or resident along the way, so be it. Ironically, all the Ashland patients are endangered, because within the bowels of the place, the evil Dr. Fletcher (Mary Woronov, Eating Raoul) and Dr. Dane (Marjoe Gortner, Starcrash) conduct their experimental research toward creating the world’s first chemical lobotomy. Any patient who misbehaves unwittingly serves as a guinea pig.

To paraphrase Spinal Tap’s “Hell Hole,” the window’s dirty, the mattress stinks, the floor is filthy, the walls are thin, the nudity is plentiful. Per the WIP template, toplessness is a must of its caged coquettes, yet Savannah Smiles (!) director Pierre De Moro throws bottomlessness in there, too, to give his flick a bonus layer of ’80s sleaze. More than eager to please in the bared-breast department is Edy Williams (Russ Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls), delivering her lines in a breathy, cue-cardy voice that makes everything sound suggestive, down to an offer of sharing soap: “Use mine. It’s hypoallergenic.” Despite her efforts to steal the show, that honor is taken by Sharkey as Silk, the chain-smoking heavy in black leather who looks like he arrived from a failed audition for Can’t Stop the Music. To continue that analogy, Nancy Walker’s loss is De Moro’s gain. —Rod Lott

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Terror in the Jungle equals hilarity in your living room. (Or in your bedroom or from your toilet or wherever you choose to stream content for which you did not pay. Just admit it.)

The brainchild of producer Enrique Torres Tudela (1976’s House of Shadows), the adventure film is so misbegotten, it took three directors to shape the dough into a presentable ball, with each man duly credited for his respective sequence: plane (Tom DeSimone, Reform School Girls), jungle (Andrew Janczak, cinematographer of The Undertaker and His Pals) and temple (Alex Graton, whose record is otherwise clean).

A plane bound for Rio carries some rather interesting passengers, including a wealthy woman acquitted (but most likely guilty) of killing her husband, a busty actress with a Joker-esque mouth, three wig-wearing members of a teen-sensation band (although each guy easily is double the age of the average screaming fan), two nuns (not counting the corpse in the carry-on coffin) and one poor preschooler named Henry Junior, forever clutching a stuffed tiger. Don’t you get attached to any of them, because when the aircraft leaks fuel and plummets into the Amazon jungle, all of them either:
• perish in the force of the wreck,
• get torn to pulled-pork shreds by alligators after leaping into the water,
• are burned to smithereens by not leaping into the water fast enough when the wrecked plane explodes
• or, in the case of one of God’s holy sisters (sorry, Sister Inferior!), get sucked out of the plane well before the treacherous nosedive.

It’s remarkable the movie spends so much time setting these characters up when it had designs from square one on doing away with them in one fell swoop — all except little Henry, who was traveling alone, plopped aboard against his wishes by his square-jawed single father to go see that hussy the boy calls Mommy. The kid makes it out with nary a scrape (severe emotional trauma excepted, of course) and floats the Amazon in the aforementioned coffin until he crosses paths with a local tribe whose members treat the boy not like the whiny brat he is, but The Chosen One. Because his golden locks literally radiate a halo in a hue reminiscent of their sun god, Inti, the tribesmen and tribeswomen wash his feet and put on shows for him and that damned stuffed tiger … which, in Terror’s peril-strewn climax, somehow temporarily comes to life to rip apart the jealous native trying to kill the kid.

Like a jungle film should, Terror ticks off some tried-and-true elements of the subgenre: snakes, piranha, quicksand, shrunken heads, an exotic score (by lounge king Les Baxter!), spear-carrying men dressed in diapers and sporting the kind of silly headwear made in Sunday school classes with construction paper and Elmer’s glue.

However, its most entertaining asset is what no other jungle pic has, but should: Henry Junior, played by Jimmy Angle. Although he never earned another credit, Angle gives the most committed, realistic performance of the film … because he does not appear to be acting. Scene to scene, Angle gives off the vibe that he is on camera against his will, as if he didn’t quite comprehend a movie was being made. His laconic delivery suggests he was slipped a Dramamine lollipop, and his constant tears — the kid cries more times than not — look real, not to mention enough to end a Third World drought.  

Not so real: the brief gore scenes rendered in a crude stop-motion process dubbed Magicmation. The technique also was glimpsed in Legend of Horror, another Tudela production, but with origins and intentions far less dubious. —Rod Lott

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